The closure of Michael Colliery in 1967 and the politics of deindustrialization in Scotland

Michael Colliery in east Fife was the largest National Coal Board (NCB) unit in Scotland when it closed in 1967, following a disastrous fire which killed nine miners. The NCB, operating within the constraints of the Labour government’s policy framework, decided not to invest in Michael’s recovery, although this would have secured profitable production within five years and access to thirty-plus years of coal reserves. This outcome, which had major local economic implications, demonstrates that deindustrialization is a willed and highly politicized process. The Labour government ignored workforce entreaties to override the NCB’s decision and invest to bring the pit back into production, but made significant localized adjustments to regional policy that within a year attracted a major employer to the area, the Distillers Company Limited. The article relates the closure to moral economy arguments about deindustrialization. It shows that coal closures in the 1960s, while actually more extensive than those of the 1980s, were managed very differently, with attention to the interests of the workers and communities affected, and an emphasis on cultivating alternative industrial employment

Continuity or Change? Older People in Three Urban Areas

The post war period has witnessed considerable changes affecting family structures and social relationships both within, and between, the generations. Recent research has examined the impact of these changes on the lives of older people living in three contrasting areas of England: Bethnal Green (a deprived, ethnically diverse, inner city are of London with a history of transient populations), Wolverhampton (an industrial and multi-cultural Midlands Metropolitan Borough, which experienced substantial redevelopment and slum clearance) and Woodford (a relatively affluent, ageing suburb in North East London). Against a background of growing concern about the increasing numbers of older people, these three areas provided the locations for a number of classic community studies undertaken in the 1940s and 50s: The Family Life of Old People (Townsend, 1957), Family and Class in a London Suburb (Willmott and Young, 1960), and The Social Medicine of Old Age (Sheldon, 1948). The original studies examined the thesis that, in the context of a developing welfare state, families were leaving the old to fend for themselves. The reality, however, was somewhat different as the rich material about the social and family networks of elderly people was to demonstrate. The focus of the paper is on reporting some of the key changes and continuities in intergenerational contact and support between the baseline studies and research undertaken in the mid 1990s in the three areas. Using both survey data and case study material, ways in which intergenerational support and care is exchanged, reciprocated and managed will be discussed. Particular reference is made to mother- daughter relationships, which highlight continuity in relation to the importance of this relationship within the older person's network, but also illustrates change in the way this is experienced by both older and younger generations.family structure; intergenerational relationships

ShaneAO: wide science spectrum adaptive optics system for the Lick Observatory

A new high-order adaptive optics system is now being commissioned at the Lick Observatory Shane 3-meter telescope in California. This system uses a high return efficiency sodium beacon and a combination of low and high-order deformable mirrors to achieve diffraction-limited imaging over a wide spectrum of infrared science wavelengths covering 0.8 to 2.2 microns. We present the design performance goals and the first on-sky test results. We discuss several innovations that make this system a pathfinder for next generation AO systems. These include a unique woofer-tweeter control that provides full dynamic range correction from tip/tilt to 16 cycles, variable pupil sampling wavefront sensor, new enhanced silver coatings developed at UC Observatories that improve science and LGS throughput, and tight mechanical rigidity that enables a multi-hour diffraction- limited exposure in LGS mode for faint object spectroscopy science.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures. Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation conference, paper 9148-7

A two-channel, Thermal Dissociation Cavity-Ringdown Spectrometer for the detection of ambient NO2, RO2NO2 and RONO2

Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0We describe a thermal dissociation cavity ring-down spectrometer (TD-CRDS) for measurement of ambient NO2, total peroxy nitrates (ΣPNs) and total alkyl nitrates (ΣANs). The spectrometer has two separate cavities operating at  ∼  405.2 and 408.5 nm. One cavity (reference) samples NO2 continuously from an inlet at ambient temperature, the other samples sequentially from an inlet at 473 K in which PNs are converted to NO2 or from an inlet at 723 K in which both PNs and ANs are converted to NO2, difference signals being used to derive mixing ratios of ΣPNs and ΣANs. We describe an extensive set of laboratory experiments and numerical simulations to characterise the fate of organic radicals in the hot inlets and cavity and derive correction factors to account for the bias resulting from the interaction of peroxy radicals with ambient NO and NO2. Finally, we present the first measurements and comparison with other instruments during a field campaign, outline the limitations of the present instrument and provide an outlook for future improvements.Publication funded by the Max Planck Societ

R. Bitterman & M.E. McCallum, Lady Landlords of Prince Edward -Island: Imperial Dreams and the Defence of Property

On 23 July 23 1767, some four years after its acquisition of Saint John\u27s Island [now Prince Edward Island] in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, Britain held a one-day lottery through which it distributed almost the entire island in sixty-six lots [townships] of about 20,000 acres each.\u27 Many lots went to individuals, civil and military servants of the crown, including such notables as John Pownall, secretary to the Lords of Trade, and Admiral Augustus Keppel. Although none of the proprietors met the principal condition oftheir grant-that they settle the land within ten years with one Protestant settler for every 200 acres-the proprietorial system remained in place for over a century. Some large proprietors lost their lands when they were sold by the local government for failure to pay quit rents, while others sold because they were worried about such legal action, with the result that by the 1830s about one-fifth of Island land was in the hands of small farmer-owners. Yet the vast majority of the land continued to be owned by descendants of the original large proprietors, and mostly worked by tenant farmers. Most of the large proprietors were absentee landlords, residents of the United Kingdom

Economic direction and generational change in twentieth century Britain: the case of the Scottish coalfields

Changes in economic direction in Britain in the twentieth century were incremental, rarely permanent, and strongly contested, although trends to deindustrialisation, widened inequality and the ostracism of trade unions from policy-making were clear by the mid-1980s. This followed the defeat of the striking miners in 1984–5, a decisive movement in macro-economic direction. This case study of the Scottish coalfields uses generational analysis to illuminate the contested nature of these long-running economic changes. Three distinct trade union generations are identified, each of which was linked to successive ideal-types of economic unit. Each type represented an ever-larger economy of scale and qualitative changes in coalfield employment: ‘Village Pits’, ‘New Mines’, and ‘Cosmopolitan Collieries’. The evolving organisation of production, combined with other powerful experiences in early adulthood, gave rise to different political goals for each successive generation. The first, born in the 1890s, won the primary objective of nationalisation in 1947; the second, born in the 1920s, secured important changes to the manner in which the nationalised industry operated in the 1960s, gaining greater control for the workforce and enhanced economic security for the wider community; the third, born in the 1950s, attempted to defend the social democratic elements of the nationalised order in the 1980s against changing macro-economic strategy and micro-managerial operations which threatened pits, jobs and the voice of the worker in decision-making. Nationalisation, it is shown, was a success from the perspective of the workforce, but only because trade unions compelled the National Coal Board and the UK government to preserve economic security in the coalfields. These victories of the 1960s were overturned, however, by the Conservative government in the 1980s, at enormous cost to coalfield communities and workers